A Key to Paradise Read online

Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;

  Now drooping, woeful wan,

  like one forlorn, Or crazed with care,

  or cross'd in hopeless love.

  Carl shook his head in disbelief. “The poem’s three hundred years old,” Grace groaned. “These kids are into MP3 players, Britney Spears and gangster rap. Old English isn’t exactly their cup of tea. ”

  A college girl at the next table pulled a new sweater from a bag and showed it to her friends. The sweater was knitted from a bulky, moss-colored yarn. Grace had seen similar designs in the upscale boutiques on Newbury Street in Boston. Imported from Ireland, you couldn’t touch them for under two hundred dollars. “I’m copying a verse from Gray’s Elegy on the blackboard. When I turn around, a girl in the front row is picking her nose. I’m explaining the subtleties of Gray’s Elegy and this ditsy girl with braces and a training bra is balancing a moist bugger on the tip of her finger.”

  “So I got this whacky idea,” Grace rushed on, “what if I pilfered some verses from your poem boxes - the haiku by Kotimichi , that amazing Helen Keller quote, some Kahlil Gibran - and taught that instead.”

  “Well, I suppose-”

  “There was a romantic poem by Pablo Neruda,” she cut him short, “something about boundaries merging.”

  Carl lowered his eyes and thought hard. “I love you,” he repeated from memory, “because I know no other way than this. Where I does not exist nor you.”

  “So close,” Grace picked up the next line, “that your hand on my chest is my hand.”

  “So close that your eyes close,” Carl delivered the final verse, “as I fall asleep.”

  Now that the noisy table of college students had paid their bill and left, the waitress began clearing the plates. “Well, I don’t know,” he added thoughtfully. “Neruda might be a little too intense for eighth graders with training bras.”

  He shook his head and began to chuckle as though at some private joke. “You’re asking me, a janitor, for advice. I’m sure Ed Gray would get a kick out of that.”

  “Ed Gray is a horses ass!” Grace impulsively leaned across the table and kissed him on the lips, a generous, unhurried gesture. “It’s the Neruda poem,” she said by way of explanation. Her chest was heaving with emotion. “I seem to be having a real problem with personal boundaries. Yours and mine.”

  It took Carl a good minute to catch his breath. “I’d kiss you back,” he said softly, “if it wasn’t for the audience.” Several customers, including a busboy and the waitress who was clearing the nearby table, were staring curiously at the couple.

  Whatever else Grace had in mind to say about Gray’s Elegy evaporated with the kiss, flew out the window of the East Side Pancake House on gilded wings. They spoke little during the ride home. Grace could feel her body glowing. When they were a mile from home Carl finally turned to look at her. “Remember when I refinished your classroom floor?” His expression was sober.

  “That was over a year ago.”

  “It still looks good, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Acrylic doesn’t hold up as well as polyurethane but it’s still a nice product.” He spoke in a flat, distracted monotone. “You were sorting papers and I was moving chairs around washing one portion of the floor at a time.”

  He leaned over and brushed her cheek with a feathery kiss. “That was when I first realized I was in love with you.” Carl said nothing more for the remainder of the ride home.

  ******

  Angie had already gone to bed and was fast asleep when Grace got home. The mail was in the kitchen piled neatly on the counter. A couple of sales flyers from the mall, the telephone bill and a notice for jury duty. On top of the pile was a crumbled potato chip bag. Lays Onion and Sour Cream. Grace found the plastic bad crammed into the mailbox earlier in the day. The word “BICH!’ was scrawled across the front in ink. A gift from the illiterate Dwight Goober. The youth had begun throwing empty Marlboro cigarette wrappers on the front lawn along with soda cans and, most weekends, beer bottles. Not that anyone ever saw him. The debris was manageable. Problem was, Grace couldn’t see where his petty hatefulness was going.

  Grace had a theory. She called it the ‘Theory of Misplaced Altruism’. Watching the Labor Day Telethon with Jerry Louis every September, her heart broke for the poor unfortunates, the children with muscular dystrophy twitching spastically in their high-backed wheelchairs. The courageous parents who devoted their lives to sick children were modern day saints. Grace called in her pledge and said a fervent prayer to the same inscrutable God she ignored through the rest of the year.

  She had no similar sympathy for that motley collection of freaks and losers in the juvenile section of Brandenburg District Court. The Dwight Goobers of the world, the sluttish girl in the revealing tank top and her mother with the horsy teeth - they threatened to rip her world to pieces with their chaos and depravity. They used the system to beat the system just like the loud­mouthed drunk who held court every morning at Adam’s Diner. The implicit message: live a thoroughly despicable life, wreck your health then go on the dole.

  Grace was reminded of a TV segment on 60-Minutes earlier in the week. A bully was terrorizing a small-town, Southern community - a redneck Dwight Goober beating up neighbors, vandalizing their property, making obscene and salacious remarks to their womenfolk. The town fathers held an impromptu meeting and decided to get rid of the bully. They shot him in the head five times and left him to bleed to death in a drainage ditch. Then they went home to their evening dinners, bowling leagues, Sunday morning church and choir practice. The crime was never solved even though everybody knew who did it. Things quieted down after that. Got back to normal. No more bully.

  No more Dwight Goober.

  After the 60-Minutes segment, Grace fantasized about buying a gun. Something high caliber, where the soft lead slugs would heat upon impact with flesh and expand as they tore through the body. She would hide in the back yard until her nocturnal nemesis arrived. No need to berate the bastard. No outbursts of self-righteous indignation. Grace, the mild-mannered English teacher, would morph into dispassionate executioner, a cross between The Terminator and Dirty Harry. Call it a cold-blooded act of revenge. No, not revenge. Retribution. Most people thought of retribution as punishment, but, properly understood, retribution was a commodity given or demanded in repayment. A dozen years from now, Grace rationalized, Dwight Goober would have amassed a small fortune in uncollected debts. Why wait?

  ******

  “Mom?” Grace drifted into her daughter’s bedroom. Angie was sitting up in bed now. “So, how was your date?”

  Grace smoothed the comforter up around her daughter’s throat. “I guess we’ll have to learn to share.”

  It took a while for her mother’s remark to register. “Figured as much.”

  “How so?”

  “By the radiant look on your face.” Angie smirked. “I haven’t seen you this happy since last summer.” Grace was trying to recall what spectacular event her daughter was referring to. “Our wilderness trip,” Angie clarified. “The Appalachian Trail.”

  ******

  The summer following her divorce, Grace Paulson and her daughter hiked the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuously marked footpath in the world. Not the two thousand miles stretching from Maine’s Mount Katahdin down through Springer Mountain in Georgia. No, nothing so daring. Rather they would start at the beginning (or the end, depending on your place of departure) and spend a week exploring various spots along the way.

  “Well, I guess it’s just us girls,” Grace said. She was loading provisions in a backpack, the lightweight frame propped up against the refrigerator. There wouldn’t be refrigerators where they were going. No stoves, central heating, flush toilets or other basic amenities. “We’ll park twenty miles below the base of Mount Katahdin and hike north. Climb to the summit and retrace our steps.”

  Angie handed her mother a stack of wooden match
es sealed in a watertight metal tube. “How high?”

  “Five thousand two hundred and sixty-eight feet.”

  “Twelve feet less than a mile.”

  “A linear mile.” Mrs. Grace smiled laconically. “Only if you zoom straight up, vertically, like a helicopter.” She took the matches and stashed them in a side pocket next to the spare flashlight batteries. The tent was tiny, just large enough for two. In the morning, they drove north on route 95, crossing the New Hampshire state line around ten a.m.. They reached north central Maine by early afternoon and parked the car in a small lot just off the trail. The weather was warm and muggy. “Get your pack up high on your shoulders,” Mrs. Grace cautioned, “so the weight’s evenly distributed.”

  A clutch of hikers, some lugging huge quantities of gear and others traveling light, passed leisurely in either direction. No one seemed in any particular hurry. Grace knelt down and fingered a smallish leaf, red fading to yellow.

  “It’s just a maple leaf,” Angie flexed her shoulders. The pack felt comfortable, not too heavy.

  “Aspen,” her mother corrected, indicating the serrated points arranged symmetrically across the leaf. “From the genus, populus. Throughout high school she had dreamed about becoming a botanists or, perhaps, an ornithologist. Plants and birds. Somewhere she got sidetracked.

  “The flattened leafstalks,” She held it up for her daughter to see, “make the leaves tremble at the slightest breeze. A very noisy plant.” She let the leaf slip from her fingers. With the sun drooping over their left shoulders, they looked north toward the summit of Mount Katahdin in the far distance. “Let’s go!” They struck off down the trail at a loping gait with Angie bringing up the rear. A half-mile down the rough trail they came to a pond, edged by thick stands of beech with a smattering of hemlock and white pine.

  Except for a few gray squirrels, they saw no animals. Passing through an open field at the far end of the pond, Grace pointed out the variety of wildflowers. An endless succession of lady’s slipper with their pouchy lips, black-eyed Susan and meadow lily. “That a jack-in-the-pulpit.” She pointed to a leafy plant. “Also known as Indian turnip. The local natives ate the roots as a main part of their diet. Some old-timers probably still do.”

  Around six, though the sun was still high, they stopped for supper. Using water from a nearby stream, Grace boiled a pan of whole grain, basmati rice over an open fire. As it cooked, the rice released aromatic, nutty odor. In a separate pan she sautéed onions and green peppers. Other hikers passed on the trail. A young boy waved and his father tipped his hat. Everyone seemed intent on getting to his or her destination before the light bled out of the sky. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, but it was still warm. “We’ll camp here for the night,” Grace announced. “I’ll put some coffee on before we unpack.”

  Angie took the blackened pan down to the stream, rinsed the last few grains of rice away and filled a canteen with fresh water. When she returned to the campsite an elderly man with a white beard and rickety legs was sitting on a stump. “Mr. Anderson,” Angie’s mother announced, “will be joining us for coffee.”

  The old man smiled displaying an expanse of pink gums and not very much in the way of teeth. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew an ivory flower surrounded by red berries. “For the girl.”

  “Dogwood?” Grace said. “They seldom flourish this far east.”

  The old man nodded. “Some people call them bunchberry, but it’s just a different name for the same plant.” Mr. Anderson wore a tan-colored hearing aide and his left hand trembled when he rested it in his lap, but it was unclear if he suffered from a chronic illness or was just tired. Despite the warm weather, he wore a long sleeve flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists. Grace fixed the coffee and passed around sugar cookies.

  The old man’s wife had passed away the previous spring. The year before she died, they hiked the Appalachian Trail as far down as Hump Mountain along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, crossing through rugged hill country where several inches of snow had fallen the previous day. “Toes got frostbitten, but it still turned out okay.” Mr. Anderson took a sip of coffee and sloshed the dark liquid in the warm, tin cup. “Met some real decent folk, along the trail.”

  He threw the last of his coffee into the fire sending up a fitful tongue of orange sparks. The more he lingered the more melancholy the old man seemed. Angie no longer noticed the huge gaps between the teeth that were and the teeth that might have been, as they rested by the campfire. The songbirds had bedded down for the night, their incessant trilling upstaged by the rhythmic clatter of crickets and bullfrogs. “Tell you a funny story before I go,” Mr. Anderson said. He rested his good hand over the other and the trembling momentarily subsided.

  “A boy wakes up one morning to find his faithful dog missing. He fashions a sign on a piece of cardboard. The sign reads: Lost Dog. Walks with limp - got run over, sideswiped by tractor-trailer last spring; gimpy hind leg; cataracts both eyes, left ear chewed off in mishap with homicidal pit bull.” The old man paused for dramatic effect. “ Answers to the name Lucky.”

  Answers to the name Lucky.

  The two women waved as the old man disappeared down the trail into the darkness. Grace understood perfectly well that most people, regardless of outward appearances, were chewed up and run over by the vagaries of life. You could have a hearty laugh while sitting at a campfire; the trick was to maintain one’s composure after leaving the solitude of the Maine woods and rejoining the money-grubbing rat race. “That’s our destination tomorrow,” Grace pointed at a bright star above a ridge of spruce. “Polaris, the North Star. It hangs like a jewel on the end of the Little Dipper and points the way to Mount Katahdin.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Grace said. She wondered if Mr. Anderson’s left hand had stopped trembling. And did he yearn for his soul mate when he lay in his sleeping bag? Did he dream of their wintry exploits on Hump Mountain? He wouldn’t have to worry about frostbite tonight. Around midnight, Angie heard her mother stir. She rolled out of the sleeping bag and went outside. “What’s the matter?” Angie asked when she returned.

  “Had to pee.” Grace crawled back into the sleeping bag and lay still.

  “I hope Mr. Anderson’s all right,” Angie whispered. “I mean, what if something happened to him?”

  Her mother reached out and brushed the girl’s cheek with her fingertips. The gesture felt like a benediction. “Angie, you are a precious child. And I’m proud to call you my daughter.”

  A few minutes later, Grace could hear her daughter’s steady breathing. Somewhere deep in the woods an owl let looses with a prolonged, resonant hoot deep as a foghorn. The crickets and frogs were unimpressed. Mr. Anderson was probably also fast asleep, dreaming about his lost youth and all the wonderful adventures that still awaited him on the A.T..

  In the morning Angie woke to find her mother’s sleeping bag empty. Grace returned before her daughter had wrestled her hiking boots on. “Come with me!” She dragged Angie down the trail past the stream, then down a narrower footpath. At the bottom of the gravelly trail, the trees fell away to reveal a sandy pond rimmed with hawthorn and Canadian yew. “A blizzard of rainbow trout! Look for yourself.”

  Angie stood with her boots nipping the water and watched as a steady procession of speckled fish cruised in and out of the shallows. “There’s enough food to feed an army.”

  “Or a hungry Indian tribe,” her mother interjected. Grace began pulling her clothes off, flinging her blouse, bra and shorts in a pile.

  Angie’ face flamed brighter than a sugar maple in late October. “Are you nuts!”

  “It’s seven o’clock in the morning. No one’s probably been by this pond in weeks. Most of the hikers won’t be back on the trail for another hour or two.” Her mother waded into the water up to her knees and, bending low, began slapping water on her arms and breasts. Grace’s body was still strong and athletic, prettier than most women’s her age; not that she ever used her attractiveness
to gain an unfair advantage.

  If anyone had suggested a mere five minutes ago that Angie would find herself skinny-dipping with her mother in the boondocks of Maine, she would have rolled her eyes and deemed them certifiably insane. The young girl pulled her T-shirt up over her head in one smooth motion. “How’s the water?”

  “Warm as a bathtub.” Her mother was floating on her back toward the middle of the pond. Angie could feel a scaly body brush up against her calf as she waded into the shallows.

  They reached the base of Mount Katahdin in the early afternoon, but the weather had turned gray and heavy rain pummeled the trail into a muddy mess. “This certainly isn’t fun,” Angie grumbled. A group of hikers returning from the summit looked beleaguered, worn out and miserable. Her mother spoke with one of the climbers. “It’s tough going. There’s a raw wind and, without sun, a good twenty degrees colder.”

  They went and huddled under a lean-to with a dozen other campers. Half an hour later the rain was still pelting the ground with relentless force. “We’ll climb tomorrow,” her mother announced. “I’ll go pitch the tent and we’ll make do until this awful weather breaks.”

  “Everything soaked. There's no a decent place to pitch a tent.”

  “We’re all in the same boat.” Grace gestured at the rest of the hikers. “You’ll just have to make do.” She left Angie crouched under the lean-to and went off to see about the tent.

  Angie began to cry but nobody noticed. They didn’t notice because all the hikers were soaked to the bone and her tears just looked like so much extra precipitation. Here we are in the middle of nowhere. We can’t even go to a motel because our stupid car is twenty stupid miles away. We’re gonna have to make do with salami and cheese and sugar cookies. How appetizing! A regular gourmet spread!

  A half-hour later, Grace returned. She managed to pitch the tent beneath a large fir. The ground was covered with a bed of pine needles, which held up reasonably well under the rain. Angie crawled into the tent and unwrapped her sleeping bag. Then she slithered in, zipped it up around her neck and, with the rain mercilessly slashing the canvas at a forty-five degree angle, went to sleep.